Re: Agility and Data Design (was: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL)

> [....]
> Don't you find it interesting that XML is one of the TLAs and
> corresponding technologies that has taken off?

Info. tech fads come and go. I have been in the industry long enough to start to see cycles of ideas go and then come back in. For example, we have gone from thin client (VT-100) to fat client, and now moving back to thin client design. "Mainframes" are just called "servers" now instead (unless it runs OS360 based OS's).

> It is a very similar
> model for communicating data as MV/PICK is for persisting it (at the
> logical level). From my experience with various data models, it looks
> to me like a good bandwagon from a number of perspectives. So, my
> intuition -- again different from yours -- is that we would be
> well-served as an industry if we take the relational model and write
> up the history on it -- rise & fall. Then we can perhaps focus on
> writing quality applications with lower costs. Just an opinion -- I
> don't definitely don't have a full proof, but I am defending the PICK
> model from the standpoint of a futurist (self-declared, but I did do a
> talk on Mosaic in 1992 or 3, before there was netscape; and on data
> marts about a decade ago), not as someone trying to cling to what is
> old. Cheers! --dawn

I cut my table teeth on XBase (dBASE clones). It was a snap to create tables, relationships between them, and inspect and edit tables in those tools. Sure, the language sometimes stunk when trying to scale, but you cannot say it made tabling-around difficult when budget was an issue. I suppose if you come from the glass-house Oracle viewpoint of things, you might look at relational differently. (XBase was not purely relational, I would note. It had some navigational aspects, but not hierarchies.) I wipped out an application that had a one-to-many relationship similar to what you described in about 2-weeks when I was still new to the tool.

I have done plenty of RAD and nimble table-based apps.

-T- Received on Tue Oct 21 2003 - 08:40:15 CEST